I spent a few years working as a cook, from crappy catering companies all the way up to a michelin-starred restaurant. At every level, it was a known "rule" that one thing you should never attempt to make in house was...ketchup.
I had a friend that worked for Jean-George in new york and brought their steak sauce with him to the restaurant we were working at. I swear to god, we had to order all these specialty fucking ingredients and dump a ton of labor into this one condiment and then people would just ask for A1 (or Ketchup).
Injuries would probably be a better statistic to use, as you much more likely to die being hit by a car than a bicycle. I'd also guess injuries in bicycle on pedestrian collisions are nearly impossible to measure accurately, as most of them are minor and go unreported.
One thing I've noticed recently is that the number of reviews that are for a completely different product seem to be skyrocketing. This was probably the final straw for me when it came to trusting Amazon reviews, and now I usually look to YouTube to get info. Granted, most of the YouTube reviews are sponsored but it seems like the reviewers are almost always up front about this and it helps to see someone physically using the product.
Given that the review problem seems to be growing worse, I wonder what the priority of fixing this is internally at Amazon. Even if I turn to another source for reviews I'll still probably purchase from Amazon if the price is lower, so I wonder what effect this actually has on their bottom line?
It seems like the only real solution is to make it so time consuming to write a review that the economics of paying someone to do so no longer make sense. I'm not entirely sure how this could be done. Maybe have a longer length requirement? Force a reviewer to upload photos? Someone once commented here that making the reviews ephemeral or decay in importance over time could be a solution, which I thought was an interesting idea.
Yes, I found my current job through Vettery. All around great experience, however I think with most of these services it depends on if you get a good recruiter. Mine happened to be fantastic. Roughly 1/3 of our engineering team was also found through Vettery (we are in NYC).
We have three RN production apps, only one is using Redux because the developer was familiar with it, not because we necessarily needed it. The other two are using Apollo Link for client-side state.
Exactly what I was going to add. Also if your battery is low, it's much better (for me, at least) to just memorize a few turns and then shut down the app. I don't need my phone pinging GPS constantly while it's in my pocket, and especially when exploring a new city, that's exactly where it should be if you want to take in the neighborhood while you get to your destination.
I never used Grocery, but used Amazon Fresh a few times in recent months. The experience was awful and after 3 orders I went back to just going to a store. Amazon clearly pays their last mile delivery people way under market and it shows. Rude, unprofessional, late and then harass you until you until you fork over a cash tip high enough to make it worth their effort. They also have a strange hangup about getting the bags back--one guy just kept the cooler bags in his van and handed me a stack of half melted frozen chicken, on another delivery my items were just left in the vestibule of my building, again not in a cooler bag.
This is pretty much exactly what I would do if I was at a job where: 1) I didn't care at all and it was temporary 2) I'm also getting paid nothing to do it. So I can't really fault the delivery people in this situation.
The TL;DR is that there is just no margin when it comes to food. Grocery, restaurants, meal kits, etc. People keep trying to deliver these experiences to your home, and having spent 5 years cooking in a restaurant and my entire childhood growing up on a farm I've reached the conclusion that it can't be done. Once you add in the cost of human labor for physical delivery, the margins go from slim to negative.
> People keep trying to deliver these experiences to your home, and having spent 5 years cooking in a restaurant and my entire childhood growing up on a farm I've reached the conclusion that it can't be done.
I think you (and I) might be in the minority here and not their intended market. I don't know anyone with experience cooking who would prefer any meal or grocery delivery services over just doing it themselves. They're probably only focused on the market whose only previous alternative is instant/frozen meals or takeout.
To us: Shitty delivery + mediocre quality = Net negative
To their intended market: Delivery on par with take out + quality that's better than take out = Net positive
Maybe, at this stage, Grocery pickup is The right thing to build.
A very convenient experience, and it gets a lot of people doing the order online.
Once you have that, and if you can convince people to get their orders at a fixed weekly window, you get delivery density, which is key at lowering shipping costs.
And as far making delivery times convenient in this method - you need to loan your customers a passively chilled box they can put on their porch, so they can pick the deliveries when they come home.
Maybe Amazon could have done this while skipping pickup. But since it's less convenient , it's hard to convince people to pay more, and maybe competitors are cheaper.
But going straight away to on-demand deliveries, with 2 hour delivery time? Sure, that's crazy.
Sounds pretty similar to my two experiences with Amazon Fresh. First guy shows up and goes into a long story about how his leg is broken and how terrible his day is going. Not to be unsympathetic, but clearly this guy was just trying to solicit a tip, which I was planning on giving anyway, but decided against after the experience. Second time around I just pick the "leave it at the door" option, and they dropped it off at the wrong building, and when I found it, it was also the wrong order.
